Banana Palace by Dana Levin

"Images that are satisfyingly clear . . . and excitingly inexplicable." -Robert Pinsky, Washington Post
"Intimate and hypnotic . . . whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical needs that poetry exists to fill." -Ploughshares
"Levin's work is phenomenological; it details how it feels to be an embodied consciousness making its way through the world." -Boston Review
In her newest collection, Dana Levin uses humor, jump-cut imagery, and popular culture references in preparation for the approaching apocalypse. Against a backdrop of Facebook, cat memes, and students searching their smartphones for a definition of the soul, Levin draws upon a culture of limited attention spans as it searches for greater spiritual meaning. The poems in Banana Palace are elliptical by design, the lines often trailing off into a white space of their own making, as if flirting with and resolving in their own isolation.
It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.
Cross-section of a banana under a microscope
the caption read.
I hunched around my little screen
sharing a fruit no one could eat.
Dana Levin has published three books of poetry, Wedding Day (Copper Canyon), Sky Burial (Copper Canyon), and her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, won the APR/Honickman Award. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence.